Can Meena Build An Indian Google?
Sana Azmi too lives in a Delhi slum. She is determined to become a lawyer. Sana has long had this ambition, but her unemployed father had made the decision to withdraw her from school this year, when she turns 16. His plan was to get her married as soon as possible, and he believed that if Sana received too much education, it would be difficult to find a suitable groom in their socioeconomic community. Moreover, they simply couldn’t afford to educate her. Sana begged her Dad to find a way; she told him that without higher education she would be like an “empty room”.
Meena’s father has now stopped drinking and is working long hours to save money for her education. He considers Meena to be the pride of the family, and is hopeful that she will lift the family out of poverty. And Sana’s parents are no longer on the lookout for potential grooms for their daughter. Instead, they are supporting and encouraging her efforts to complete high school and continue on to university.
The Roshni formula is simple: empower smart girls with self confidence, critical thinking skills, basic social skills, and life skills—and make them realize that they can succeed by working hard and taking risks. Roshni girls, all of whom live below the poverty line yet maintain top academic standing, undergo intensive education through three training modules over a six-month period. The curriculum covers 25 subjects, ranging from public speaking to conflict management to hygiene. Students are also taught computer and internet basics. At the end of each training season, 60 top-performing students are granted scholarships by the Nurul Hasan Foundation to pursue their secondary and higher education.
Conditions for the poor in India are dire, and people live at the extremes; but, sadly, things aren’t always that much better in some parts of the U.S. and in other parts of the world. You don’t have to go as far as Harlem, NY, or Durham, NC, to see poverty and disfranchised youth. In Silicon Valley, you can just visit schools in East Palo Alto or Oakland. In fact, Saima Hasan says that she got the idea for developing the Roshni program while tutoring students in East Palo Alto. That’s where she hopes to pilot, next year, an American version of her program.
My conclusion: if Roshni girls can rise above poverty, alcoholism, gender bias, domestic violence, marriage pressures, religious oppression, and a wide range of complex social and economic obstacles through pure hard work and determination, so can underprivileged communities in the U.S. There is nothing to stop us from lifting our minorities out of poverty and fixing the societal problems such as those that I’ve previously written about—American girls being left out of the tech world.
Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.